The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (43 page)

Here, too, are Esmond’s acute perceptions of how the war was going, and his own shift in mood. He had entered the Canadian Air Force in the ranks. Before long he had applied for a commission as a pilot officer. ‘There are a great many advantages in every way in being an Officer in England now,’ he explained. He could justify his change of attitude because commissions were awarded based on performance in the courses, not on one’s background, and an added incentive was increased pay. Decca, however, was not to regard this as ‘the Price of Principles’, it was simply that he was ‘absolutely using every particle of the good in the situation and none of the bad’.
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As summer turned into autumn he was moved to Saskatchewan for advanced training before being sent to Europe. His mother, Nellie Romilly, wrote that she was thrilled to hear he was to be in London and Decca forwarded it, remarking gloomily that it seemed Nellie could hardly wait to apply for a posthumous VC for Esmond. Meanwhile, she had found a job in an exclusive dress shop, Weinberger’s, which paid well (if one discounted the ‘damages’ she was always having to pay for because she was clumsy), and through her work (‘Weinbergering’, she called it) she met members of ‘the rich set’ in Washington. By now Esmond knew about the baby, but her employer did not and Decca was slightly concerned when Mrs Weinberger drew attention to the fact that ‘Mrs Romilly’s waistline appears to be rather thick’.
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Decca took to wearing a corset, until she fainted one day and Virginia made her leave it off. Esmond, too, could be very funny: on 11 September he wired Decca with a standard message that he had chosen from a book of templates: ‘On this occasion of your birthday may we offer our congratulations and express our pleasure at having been allowed to serve you in the past together with the hope that we may continue to do so in the future. Romilly.’
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The couple saw each other occasionally. Once, Decca bussed up to Montreal to meet him and he parked their old car in the street outside the boarding-house where she was staying. Next morning they found that the trash collectors, who thought it had been abandoned, had cleared it away. She found him deeply concerned that his application for a commission might be turned down because during his medical it had been discovered that he had suffered a mastoid in his childhood. Here, for once, Nellie proved helpful to him. She personally contacted Beaverbrook and Churchill to see if anything could be done. At first it seemed hopeless: ‘Experience has shown that those who have suffered from mastoid cannot stand heights,’ Beaverbrook wrote. ‘I am told the regulations are severely adhered to . . . it seems he must seek a ground job.’
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But with these big guns firing on his behalf Esmond was cleared to fly, having proved in a practical manner that he could stand flying at great heights, but only as a navigator, not a pilot. Almost as an afterthought Nellie mentioned to Esmond that his cousin Diana Churchill had told her that Lord Lothian had seen Decca in Washington and reported that she was pregnant – Esmond had forgotten to tell his mother this news.

Meanwhile Max Mosley, Diana’s fourth child, was born on 13 April. The Mosleys had given up Wootton a few months earlier and moved into Savehay Farm at Denham, Buckinghamshire, the house Cimmie had loved and left to Mosley. Cimmie had been dead six years, and Mosley’s Curzon sisters-in-law had drawn further away from him, though remaining in contact because of Cimmie’s children. Mosley needed a base nearer London and, anyway, it had become financially impossible to continue to run both establishments; indeed, there was even talk of letting Savehay. When the German radio project folded due to the outbreak of war Mosley was virtually ruined. Diana estimates that he put £100,000 of his own money (well over £2 million today) into the BUF. He was now reliant on family trusts, under the supervision of his sisters-in-law, to pay the school fees for Cimmie’s two sons, and even to bring out his elder daughter Vivien.
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This caused significant bad feeling, because the sisters were determined not to allow Mosley to use any money from the trust fund to finance the ailing and unpopular BUF and were suspicious of him.

As Diana had said to Hitler, Mosley continued to ca mpaign for peace between the two countries until the declaration of war, after which he argued for a negotiated peace. It was not until 9 May 1940, a few weeks after Max’s birth, when Hitler squashed any remaining doubt of his intention to dominate Europe, that Mosley made a statement to the effect that the BUF was at the disposal of the British armed forces. He then advised members that he expected them ‘to resist the foreign invasion with all that is in us’. He also attempted to join his old regiment. None of this did anything to change the public perception of Mosley. He was by now the most hated, and even feared, figure in public life in England. Although he never actively supported Hitler – it was Mussolini whom he, along with Winston Churchill in the early 1930s, had always regarded as ‘the most interesting man in Europe’ – neither had he condemned him. He was regarded by the majority in Britain, including most politicians, as a dangerous Hitlerite who, should Germany be successful in invading Britain, which looked ominously possible in May 1940, would end up as a Germano-British puppet dictator reporting to his Nazi masters.
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Although Mosley’s two sole contacts with Hitler had been through Diana, her frequent visits to Germany to further the radio project, her meetings with Hitler and Hitler’s presence at the Mosleys’ marriage ceremony harmed Mosley because these events appeared to the British public to demonstrate a close relationship between him and Hitler. We now know that such a relationship never existed, and Mosley always insisted that the puppet-dictator scenario was never a possibility. He wished to be Britain’s leader all right, but not under Hitler. He saw Fascism strictly in terms of its application in Britain as a political expediency, not subject to Germany or Italy. Without straying into the details of a repulsive ideology, or the fact that Mosley preached the overthrow of one of the oldest successful forms of democratic government in the world, according to his own lights Mosley was a patriot who sought peace with all Britain’s sovereign possessions intact. His biggest fear was that war with Germany would cost Britain the Empire and, of course, history proved him right. Years later Diana told her stepson Nicholas Mosley that her relationship with Hitler had ruined her life. ‘And’, she added, ‘I think it ruined your father’s.’
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We do not know precisely what Hitler had in mind for Britain if his invasion plans had been successful, but we know what he thought of Mosley: in May 1940, at about the time when the BEF was trapped on the beaches of Normandy, Hitler spoke of him to an adjutant. ‘After our meal,’ Gerhard Engel wrote in his diary, ‘a long conversation and dialogue from Hitler about Mosley, [he said that] Mosley might have been able to prevent this war. He would never have become a populist leader, but he could have been the intellectual leader of true German–British communication. He [Hitler] is convinced that Mosley’s role hasn’t run its course yet.’
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Although Diana is adamant that this was never what Mosley intended, and that ‘Mosley would never have accepted such a role’,
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had the Germans successfully invaded Britain it is possible that Mosley would have been a prime candidate for the position of Fascist overlord.
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Diana disagrees. At forty-three he was too young, she said. A more likely candidate, she feels, would have been Lloyd George, a much older man who had been a great figure in the First World War, ‘like Pétain in France. Also Lloyd George greatly admired Hitler and they got on extremely well together, which Hitler and Mosley never did.’
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Lloyd George’s admiration of Hitler is historical fact. As late as 1936 he regarded Hitler as ‘the greatest leader in the world’, and even told him so during a visit to Germany.
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On 23 May the Mosleys drove to their London apartment. Mosley had given up the house in Grosvenor Road and bought a flat in a modern building a short distance away, in Dolphin Square. As they drew up they saw a group of men waiting near the entrance. They were plain-clothes policemen and produced a warrant for Mosley’s arrest. Although Mosley must have recognized that he was deeply unpopular he had never done anything illegal and both he and Diana thought that the matter would be quickly resolved, that a trial would exonerate him. But there was no charge, and there was never a trial.

In the previous summer, when war was known to be imminent, an Emergency Powers Act had been rushed through Parliament. An amendment to Rule 18B of this act, made in the following months, enabled the Home Secretary to arrest and detain without trial anyone of ‘hostile origin or association’ if this was believed necessary for the defence of the realm. In May 1940, when Hitler’s troops advanced clear across Europe and there was justifiable fear of an invasion, ‘a wave of fifth-column hysteria swept the country’.
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Churchill’s new National Government decided to arrest and detain enemy aliens, Fascists and Communists, on the grounds that they were a potential security risk, and also for their own safety. During the First World War German nationals had been badly treated by angry British citizens. Accordingly, Rule 18B was amended, and under Rule 18B(1a) the government was now empowered to imprison indefinitely, without trial, any member of an organization which, in the Home Secretary’s view, was subject to foreign control, or whose leaders were known to have had association with leaders of enemy governments, or who sympathized with the system of government of enemy powers. This may be regarded as poetic justice by some, for although Mosley argued hotly that his arrest and incarceration were against rights laid down in Magna Carta, there is good reason to believe that had his party ever come to power those rights would have been sacrificed by him for expediency. He had, after all, proposed similar legislation in 1931 to combat mass unemployment.
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The following day Diana visited Mosley in Brixton Prison, and found, with some difficulty, a solicitor willing to represent him. Many of the BUF officials had been arrested with Mosley, and Diana agreed to perform a few tasks for the party, such as paying outstanding wages. When she returned to Denham and her children, the police were hard on her heels, with a warrant to search the house. From documents at the Public Record Office we now know that Diana was not arrested at the same time as Mosley because the security services wished to keep her under surveillance. Her phone was tapped, her mail intercepted, her movements and contacts recorded during the entire time that she was at liberty. Within a short time she was informed that Savehay was to be requisitioned for the war effort, and she began to pack.

Sydney and Unity, who were frequent visitors to Savehay Farm, came on the bus from High Wycombe, and Lord Berners, another frequent visitor, also called to cheer her up. Pam came to the rescue, offering to take in Diana, the babies and Nanny Higgs at Rignell House until things had sorted themselves out. Meanwhile Diana visited Mosley once a week and took in books and old country clothes at his request. Not wanting to worry her, he told her that everything was fine, and it was a long time before she discovered that the cells allotted to BUF prisoners were infested with bed-bugs and lice. On 29 June, Diana was also taken into custody and government records show that it was always intended that she should be. Any doubts that might have existed were swept away when several members of her own family freely advised officials that Diana was at least as dangerous as Mosley, if not more, for it was she who was the friend of Hitler, not he.

Nancy, who knew nothing of the reason for Diana’s frequent visits to Germany – to obtain an airwave – was one of those who informed on her sister. On 20 June, nine days before Diana was arrested, Nancy admitted this to Mrs Hammersley: ‘I have just been round to see Gladwyn
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at his request to tell him what I know . . . of Diana’s visits to Germany,’ she wrote. ‘I advised him to examine her passport to see how often she went. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty.’
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Lord Moyne, Bryan Guinness’s father, wrote to Lord Swinton to inform him ‘of the extremely dangerous character of my former daughter-in-law’.
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He submitted as supportive evidence a two-page memorandum based on the testimony of his grandsons’ (Jonathan and Desmond) governess, who recounted statements and opinions that she claimed to have heard or overheard Diana making. Irene Ravensdale wrote to the Home Secretary saying virtually the same thing: that Diana was as dangerous as Mosley.

As a result of surveillance of and information-gathering on Diana, the head of MI5, Brigadier Harker, recommended that ‘this extremely dangerous and sinister young woman should be detained at the earliest possible moment’.
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He understood that she had been the principal channel of information between Mosley and Hitler, had been deeply involved in the radio project from which ‘all the profits were to go to Mosley [
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]’, and not least because she clearly approved of Unity Mitford’s disloyal behaviour and friendship with Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Streicher.
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Clearly, the government knew everything about the radio project, and of Mosley’s involvement, probably through Bill Allen. Diana states that Mosley was aware of Bill Allen’s involvement with the Secret Service. ‘He always told us that he was an agent. Mosley never minded. He said he had nothing to hide. The secrecy about the radio station was only to prevent the press from knowing.’
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Nevertheless, every movement of Mosley and Diana, for many years previous to the war and since, had been reported and, notably, Bill Allen was not among the eight hundred members of the BUF who were imprisoned under Rule 18B.